Rendering with direct lighting takes too long
For direct lighting in Cycles, you need to set bounces to 0, not 1, as done by the Direct Light preset. There is a bounce of indirect light in your render.

If you want to get performance closer to Blender Internal direct lighting, you can switch to branched path tracing, lower AA samples to e.g. 8, and increase the samples on the individual lights and world as needed to reduce noise.